piyaztli. | Nahuatl Dictionary

⚠ Site currently under repair ⚠

Search Issues: Update 2026-08-17 - Repairs are ongoing. Thank you for your continued patience!

Some of our more complex, multi-field searches (such as the search field on our homepage and Search All Fields) are currently under repair and may not work as expected.

Thank you to all our users who emailed to alert us to the problem! We hope to have it repaired soon.

Meanwhile, elements of the Advanced Search are working and the Alphabetical Listings are working, too.

piyaztli.

Headword:

piyaztli.

Principal English Translation:

a long thin squash (see Molina); also, a tube; and by extension, the urethra (see Sahagún); a long thin gourd used to conduct liquid (Kartunnen)

Orthographic Variants:

piaztli

Alonso de Molina:

piaztli. calabaza larga y delgada, que sirue de auenencia.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 81v. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Attestations from sources in English:

See an image that represents piyaztli in the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities, 2020-present).

piaztli = tube (listed in association with the urethra); piaztic = tube-like; topiazio = our tube; vel icac inpiaztli, qualli, in cocôtli = [when] the tube is vertical, the uretha [is] good; vel icac yn acatl, maxixa = [when] the reed is vertical, one urinates (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 10 -- The People, No. 14, Part 11, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1961), 132, 133.